Learning to play the piano is a difficult yet rewarding task. One of the most difficult hurdles in learning how to play the piano is comprehending musical notation and relating the notes on a page of music to the keys on the piano.
To the uninitiated, a piano keyboard is daunting. The keyboard comprises a set of adjacent depressible keys, including larger, longer keys and smaller, shorter keys that repeat at the interval of an octave. Almost every modern piano has 36 black keys and 52 white keys for a total of 88 keys (seven octaves plus a minor third, from A0 to C8). The lowest pitch, A0, is on the left, and the highest pitch, C8, is on the far right. Within each octave, twelve notes of a musical scale are laid out with the lowest note on the left; the longer white keys (for the seven “natural” notes of the C major scale: C, D, E, F, G, A, B) jut forward. The black keys for the remaining five notes which are not part of the C major scale (namely C/D, D/E, F/G, G/A, A/B) are raised and set back.
To play a song on a piano, a student must be able to comprehend sheet music. A problem students have with reading music is that the symbols on the page represent a significant quantity and quality of information. The pitches of music are indicated with symbols, called notes, placed on a staff—five parallel lines on which each line and space represent a pitch. Notes can be natural, sharp or flat. The higher a note's placement on the staff, the higher the pitch. Seven of the twelve pitches of an octave are named after the first seven letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F, G. The remaining five tones are indicated by the use of two signs, the sharp sign () and the flat sign (). A clef is placed at the beginning of the staff to show the pitch of each line and space and represent which hand is used. Music is written in different keys—each associated with the presence of a central note, scale, and chord—which are indicated by a key signature. Rhythms are indicated with notes indicating time values relative to each other. The shape of the note head, the presence or absence of a stem, and the presence or absence of flags/beams/hooks may all determine the duration. Any of various rest symbols indicates a silence of a determined duration. Each element on the page adds a layer of complexity to the music. With so much information being presented, written music can seem like a jumble of dots and lines without meaning. It comes as no surprise that novice musicians may feel daunted when confronting even basic music scores.
For many novices, the notation on sheet music is cryptic and overwhelming. Students frequently abandon a musical curriculum not because they are poor musicians, but because they have difficulty making sense of music notation. Even if beginners have been instructed on what the notes and staffs symbolize, they have difficulty deciphering meaning from the notation and struggle to apply the notes to the keyboard. Yet, heretofore, learning how to read has been essential to progressing on the piano with its range of seven octaves and 88 keys.
Prior attempts to address these difficulties have involved creating keyboard charts and correspondingly notated sheet music. By way of example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,881,887 to Berens describes a guide with vertical numerically color coded lines. The guide is propped along the space between the keys and the fallboard of the piano. Sheet music is prepared with numbers and colors juxtaposed to the notes corresponding to the lines, so that the piano student will know which keys to stroke. Unfortunately, the mixing of numbers and colors to identify a key presents unique recognition and comprehension difficulties. Additionally, no indications are provided for duration. Furthermore, no means is provided to annotate or modify the charts.
The invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems and solving one or more of the needs as set forth above.